A week ago we held the external pitches for our film projects this year. This meant that the audience was bigger and included some industry professionals and students from other year groups, which was very exciting. I updated my slide show from the internal pitch with the progress I made.
Most notably I created a story board as well as a test shot (which is not yet finalised, but I think I'm getting pretty close to having a blueprint for my workflow and final look/compositing).
I made an illustration, where I tried to capture in one image what this film is about. It also includes the working title for the film, which I am growing more fond of by the day ;)
The character plus logline for my film. The character (I need to come up with a name for her) will be animated with pencil on paper, then shot and then I will add ink shading and shoot the image sequence again. It will also require a track matte fill which I will probably do in Tv Paint. You can see what it will look like in the test shot further down this page.
Here are the rough and yet detailed storyboards for the animation. I might change a few things when developing this into an animatic in the next few weeks, but it provided a good layout and got me thinking more about the individual scenes.
I think the shots that shows the progression throughout the story the best is the close ups of the feet. First we see her wearing shoes and a lot of people rushing past. The second close up, in nature, shoes how she takes off her shoes to really feel the grass under her feet. In the third and last close up she walks barefoot through the city while a little plant grows out of the concrete. The combination of both the nature and city elements in the last close up shot provides a good visual resolution to the story and the fact that she is now barefoot in the city hints at the ambiguous interpretation of the journey she went on.
I am already in touch with someone who might be able to create foley and sound effects for the film, as well as a second year student who is interested in helping me with some of the animation, which is amazing. I will talk more with them once I have the animatic done, as that will provide a better basis to discuss how to progress. At that point I will also get in contact with composers.
And finally here is the test shot. I picked on of the more important shots, the one where our main character sees the city from the moon. I took this one because I wanted to see what the 3d camera movement with the different ink backgrounds would look like. Having done that, I now think it would have been better to compose a more simple setting for the test shot rather than fiddling with many different layers straight away. It would have also been better had I figured out the values of the different layers before painting them, as I had to alter them through colour correction in AE, which turned out alright but it lost some of the original appeal. While I think I am almost there with the look and comp settings, it is probably a good idea to compose another (much simpler) test shot, where I take into account what I learned with this one, and which I can then use as a blueprint for the entire film.
